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EINSTEIN'S LEGACY
NOVEMBER 27, 1995
TRANSCRIPT
Essayist Paul Hoffman, editor of Discover Magazine, considers the the pay off for good scientific research.
PAUL HOFFMAN: This summer, two physicists in Colorado, Karl Wyman and Eric Cornell, announced that they had made a new form of matter, a super atom, the white peak in this computer diagram. They did it by cooling atoms to the lowest temperatures ever achieved anywhere in the universe.
SPOKESMAN: This green and yellow part down at the bottom, those are just the remaining atoms, the ones that haven't gotten so cold yet.
PAUL HOFFMAN: Even though their chilly creation lasted only 15 seconds, their elusive super atom made front-page news around the world. Other scientists lost no time in praising the discovery as a "Holy Grail" of science, as breathtakingly beautiful, and as worthy of the Nobel Prize. The normally staid scientific community went gaga because it's not every day, in fact, it's not every century that someone discovers a new form of matter. The known forms can be counted on one hand. Three of the forms we learned about in grade school: solids, liquids, and gasses. A fourth called plasma exists in the deep sweltering interiors of stars. The fifth, and only other known form of matter, is the recently glimpsed super atom, whose existence Albert Einstein predicted in 1925. The Einstein factor is another reason for all the excitement. Few predictions of the master have taken seven decades to confirm. It took 70 years, because this form of matter does not exist naturally in the universe. Super atoms exist only at extremely low temperatures, a billion times colder than the coldest depths of outer space. Such temperatures are only a whisker above absolute zero: the theoretical, unattainable temperature of nearly minus 460 degrees Fahrenheit, at which all atoms would come to a complete rest. Resting is not what atoms like to do. In ordinary gas, atoms are zipping around at a thousand miles per hour. The Colorado physicists slowed atoms of rubidium gas by shooting lasers at them.
SPOKESMAN: Laser beams coming from all six directions push the atoms into the middle, make them, pass them into a dense, cold balm, takes them from room temperature all the way down to just a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero. You can see the ball there. I'm going to briefly turn off the field and you'll see this ball just sort of puff away, like a puff of smoke. Here it goes.
PAUL HOFFMAN: As soon as the physicists announced their discovery, they were bombarded with the inevitable, if premature, questions about what good super atoms were. Would they make the trains run on time or cure cancer? And if nothing quite that monumental, would super atoms at least do something useful, like fixing runs in stockings? But the physicists did not want to be pinned down. They did speculate that super atoms might lead someday perhaps to such practical applications as more powerful microscopes and computers. But that didn't satisfy those who wanted them to be more specific. We live in a society that cannot delay gratification, that demands results now, but that's not how most good science works. Good science comes from researchers going where no researcher has gone before and making discoveries that are so novel that no one can begin to see their ramifications. When the chemical element silicon was discovered in 1824, no one knew then that it would be the basis of computer chips, never mind breast implants. When the Moravian monk and pea-plant breeder, Gregor Mendel, discovered the principles of plant breeding in the 1860s, he could not have foreseen, of course, that these principles would lead a century later to the Green Revolution of the 1960s, the creation of new strains of wheat and rice that kept millions of people in less developed parts of the world from starving. When the chemical element lithium was discovered in 1817, no one knew then that its measured use would help manic depressives lead calmer lives. Imagine if Isaac Newton's research that resulted in the discovery of gravity had to be approved by a congressional committee. I can imagine the skeptical reaction: apples, you want taxpayers to find your study of falling apples? And sure enough, even a man as sage as Newton did not know that an understanding of gravity would lead to the invention of the roller coaster and the rocket ship. If the history of science is any guide, such a fundamental discovery as a fifth form of matter will prove to be monumentally useful, even if our crystal balls aren't shiny enough to see precisely how. I'm Paul Hoffman.
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